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The Microsoft Dilemma....or is it??

Hello once again to all the masters of technology. I have once again come into a problem I am unable to wrap my head around so here it goes.

We have a somewhat new Dell desktop (9100 with P4 Dual Core, 2GB ram, huge harddrive, dvd/cd burners, the works) here in our office. All the drivers are up to date, so are the bios, software, etc. The only issue is it still runs slower than anything in the office. We have run all types of scans and diagnostics on it, but everything comes back ok. I cannot seem to pinpoint what is causing the sluggish/jerkyness of this system. It even happens when booting into safe mode.

Programs run slowly and take a while to respond and load. Even getting simple items like a command prompt or control panel to open takes longer than it should. I have uninstalled everything I can think of and have shut down a majority of services. Still the same slow response from the system. I really do not want to spend a huge chunk of my day starting this system over from scratch and then reinstalling everything and setting it up for one of our employees. Not to mention it would kill his productivity and cause a bit of downtime for him and me. Does anyone know why Windows or maybe the system is having such a hard time doing simple and complex tasks? Is it just that windows in time will fall apart or is something corrupted that the diag. couldn't detect. I would be forever in your debt. if you could shed a little light on this issue.

Dell support as you may have guessed was a waste of time and I do not want to call MS cause that won't be fun and probably cost a bit of money just to ask them a question. Thanks again as you guys have been a great help in the past.

If that doesn'twork then you haven't much choice other than to reinstall.

What I don't like is that you get the same symptoms in safe mode

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Outside of the Hard drive, which is a great starting point, check out the Capaictors for Bad Caps

The clickee should give you a basis for what to look for. I think all the Dell caps have a tri-cut in the top of them and if any of them are rounded instead of flat you will have bad caps as well as looking to see if any of them are distended or have bulge indications.

Harddrive appears to be error free and I even ran the dell HD diag., no antivirus running at all (I removed it to see if that was the issue). I will have to test the memory and try windows repair. That is a good idea to run HiJackThis and compare it to another same model of Dell just to see if I can see anything. However what are things I should look for in HiJackThis that should set off an alarm or cause concern? Thanks for the ideas guys and keep em coming.

When things are running slowly, you might look at the processes in task manager? What I am wondering is whether the resources are actually being used, or is it some other sort of problem. If the resources are being used, what is using them?

You might try CrapCleaner to get rid of unwanted stuff.

Another cause could be that your registry has become screwed up......................you might try Registry Mechanic.

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Yes the harddrive seems to be a-ok. In the task manager it only seems to use a few percent of the processor and only a little memory. Nothing seems to be draining the system resources in the task manager. No resources seem to be used just a usual 98-99% system idle process. I will try crapcleaner and see how messed up the registry is. So far I am getting closer to just starting over. Thanks again for the advice.

If you want to do some more thorough tests on more hardware, motherboard, cpu, etc try Hiren's Boot CD, it is a great disk packed full of utilities for almost anything related to hardware diagnostics... it seems to be kinda hard to find for download on the internet, but if you have usenet access you can find details here http://www.newzbin.com/browse/post/1849922/

PS Be careful with the HDD diagnostics tools, they may happily wipe your hard drive clean

When you run a memory test, if there is more than one stick, run the check, then swap the sticks and run it again. Sometimes, you can find a bad section or stick that way.

Since this isn't a brand-spanking new system, I assume that is has been run for a while. Has the user had a removable hard drive (USB) connected to the system recently? Have you checked the Device Manger for "unknowns" in the device listing? Are there driver issues? Sometimes these can cause slowdowns as the system is trying to load or find things.

Also, Outlook? Does the user have Word set as the email editor for Outlook? If so, change that. This setting can keep a copy of Word loaded in the system at all times. It will significantly slow a box to a crawl, if there isn't a lot of RAM on it.

Oh, yeah 2: what is loading at startup? Check that all applications or services loading at startup are valid and exist. Some of your problems could be Windows trying to run or load something at startup that is broken, missing or just mis-behaving.